Quentin Tarantino Has a ‘Big Thing’ Against Killing Animals in His Movies: ‘A Bridge I Can’t Cross’
Quentin Tarantino has a line he will not cross when it comes to violence onscreen.
The “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” auteur explained during a Cannes Film Festival event that he would never “kill” an animal in one of his films, citing the “incompetence” of showing cruelty toward animals in cinema. (Via Variety.)
“I have a big thing about killing animals in movies. That’s a bridge I can’t cross,” Tarantino said. “Insects too. Unless I’m paying to see some bizarro documentary, I’m not paying to see real death. Part of the way that this all works is that it’s all just make-believe.”
He continued, “That’s why I can stand the violent scenes, because we’re all just fucking around. [But] some animal, some dog, some llama, some fly, some rat, doesn’t give a fuck about your movie. I’d kill a million rats, but I don’t necessarily want to kill one in a movie or see one killed in a movie, because I’m not paying to see real death.”
The “Kill Bill” director added, “Almost always, it’s not just the violence that I have a problem with. There’s usually an incompetence factor in there.”
Tarantino is instead totally fine using violence onscreen to correct the wrongs of history. For “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino said, “I wrote myself into a corner and said, ‘Now what do I do?’ Then all of a sudden, the thought just came to me, ‘Just fucking kill him. Wait, can I do that? Well yeah, it’s my story.’ But in the case of ‘Once Upon a Time,’ I wrote that to save Sharon and kill those motherfuckers.”
The writer-director concluded, “Kurosawa would do this a lot. He would write himself into a corner and tell his writers to get him out.”
Tarantino recently gave more details on his final film “The Movie Critic,” which will center around a “porno rag journalist” who published film reviews.
“I haven’t decided yet but it’s going to be somebody in the 35-year-old ballpark. It’ll definitely be a new leading man for me,” Tarantino said. “I do have an idea of somebody I can imagine doing it really well…”
As for capping off his movie career, Tarantino, who has long said he will stop at 10 feature films, added, “It’s just time to go out. I like the idea of going out on top. I like the idea of giving it my all for 30 years and then saying, ‘OK, that’s enough.’ And I don’t like working to diminishing returns. And I mean, now is a good time because I mean, what even is a motion picture anyway anymore? Is it just something that they show on Apple? That would be diminishing returns.”